


Fever Fear

by thesearchforbluejello



Series: Cassian Appreciation Week [1]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Angst, Cassian Appreciation Week, F/M, but really it's pretty minor this time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-26
Updated: 2018-07-26
Packaged: 2019-06-16 09:38:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15434190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesearchforbluejello/pseuds/thesearchforbluejello
Summary: Stumbling through the forest, Cassian reflects on his fears.





	Fever Fear

**Author's Note:**

> Tardy to the party again-- my beginning to Cassian Appreciation Week got off to a rough start. The prompt was "dream," and I ended up with this. Thanks to Thealorn for the quick beta and listening to me complain about choosing a title. Each of this week's pieces fits in with my rebelcaptain week series. This one can fall either before or after "To Return," but before "In the Space Between."

When the guard opens the door, Cassian is ready. He's on the floor, limp, looking for all the world like he's unconscious, but as soon as the guard is close enough he strikes. One kick to the back of the man's legs takes him to the ground. Once the guard on the floor, it's over quickly. A sharp punch to the throat renders him incapable of crying out; Cassian chokes him into unconsciousness before he has a chance to free himself.

Cassian snags the guard's blaster, staggering to the door as the effort of subduing the man grips him, clutching and pulling at his already exhausted muscles. He's burning up, has been for hours, and the sweat that's dampening his clothes is making him shiver in the cool hallway. His head continues to pound even though the lights are mercifully dim. Whatever that was they'd given him, he feels like shit.

It wasn't supposed to go this way. 

Jyn had warned him, saying that she didn't think he should go alone. She'd confessed, with the tight set of her shoulders that always belied discomfort, that she had a bad feeling about the rendezvous she couldn't shake. He'd shrugged it off, teasing her lightly that she sounded like K. The corners of her mouth had curved upward, just a bit, an effort at a smile that wasn't genuine enough to reach her eyes. She'd made a comment, then, about how a droid with no emotions seems to have an awful lot of "feelings," and then she'd let it drop.

He wishes now that he'd listened to her and renegotiated the meeting. She'd been covering him, up on the hill, but it must have all happened too fast for her to get a shot off. Either that or she'd been captured too, an alternative he doesn't want to consider.

He leans against the wall, just for a moment, shutting his eyes against the dilapidated hallway bending and distorting around him, resting his temple against the cool, crumbling duracrete.

He hears blaster fire ahead of him and jerks unsteadily upright again. His own blaster is heavy in his hands but he holds it ahead of him, ready. There are footsteps approaching, quickly, and then she rounds the corner.

"Jyn," he says, dumbly even to his own ears, because his brain is muddled and hazy and he wasn't expecting to see her, much less alone.

"Let's go," she says, face blank but tight. "It's not going to take them long to realize you never made it to wherever that guard was taking you. You need to get out of here before this whole place is swarming with people looking for you."

"Yes," is all he says. Jyn nods and leads him down the hallway. "There should be a, um, junction, up ahead, and one of the hallways leads to an--an exit."

"Which one?" Jyn asks without turning back to him.

"The um..." he pauses and tries to grope his way through the fog clinging to his thoughts. "The left one. No-- second to the left. It's a junction of-- of five corridors."

The hallway turns a corner at a smaller intersection, and Cassian hears boots ahead. He ducks back around the corner, out of sight, Jyn falling into place behind him. 

"For a secondary base, it's pretty deserted," she whispers.

"They must be out looking for you," he says.

The footsteps, luckily, turn into one of the adjoining corridors and recede. Cassian sighs, resting his head against the wall.

"Come on," Jyn says. "You're almost there." Cassian nods, taking the lead, advancing as quickly down the hallway as his exhaustion allows, blaster at the ready. They have to duck into adjoining corridors twice to avoid the movement of personnel, hoping each time that the footsteps won't turn their way. They keep moving as soon as it's safe. Straight through two more junctions. Second hall to the left.

The door is locked, controlled by the decades old computer mainframe. Cassian stares blankly at the screen.

"I taught you how to slice that," she says. "Do it now; you might not have much time."

He nods, tapping through commands on the screen. He knows how to do this. He knows he does. There's a way to turn the alarm off, if he can just find it. He worms his way through systems and subsystems, one hand tight on his blaster, until the computer chirps and the alarm deactivates. He wrenches the door open, blinding himself with forest sunlight. He stumbles out, shutting and sealing the door behind him, hoping the noise doesn't carry through the whole compound.

The forest is spotted and dappled with golden-hued light. It shifts and mutates, kaleidoscoping as the leaves rustle above him in gentle waves that sound like the sea. He stumbles away from the compound, headed blindly away.

***

He doesn't know how long he walks.

He's thirsty and his mouth is dry. His muscles strain and ache just with the effort of walking and the pressure of his headache bows his head a little more with each step. He's looking down, blaster too heavy to hold at the ready, and he watches the forest floor. The shifting dapples look like sunlight transmuted through water, transient and protean. His mind is awash with gold and green and brown and the sound of the wind in the trees is the rushing of waves. 

***

He's laying on the ground, and he's not sure when he fell.

He misses Jyn, fiercely, an absence he feels as the presence of an unwelcome pressure in his chest. His mind conjures another image of her, but he looks away, now knowing a shade for what it is. He can't remember the gray-green of her eyes, the gold and red and brown of her hair, the bow of her lips. He's never been a man to live in color, and looking directly at her is like looking at sunlight, or starlight. His instincts tell him not to.

It's fear, he knows, because he had made his peace with the fact that he had spent his life running from something, and that knowledge was no more an enemy on the Scarif beach than it was a consolation. But knowing now that maybe he was wrong, maybe he's been running to something all this time-- that is a truth he cannot find the courage to confront.

He has never considered himself a brave man. Cunning, clever, ruthless, resourceful-- yes. But never brave. 

Jyn, he thinks, is brave. Cunning, clever, ruthless, and resourceful also, but brave as well. 

He has thought often over the past few months that he should have told her to leave. Instead, he'd told her she should stay. He'd told her she could have a home with the rebellion and hoped she understood everything he was offering.

It was fear.

He was too afraid to let her walk away, to live a life knowing the absence of her star-bright presence, to go back to what had been before, her loss all the more acute in its juxtaposition with the hollow space he had never noticed, had never known she was meant to fill.

He hears shouts approaching, booted feet dull on the forest floor.

He struggles to raise the blaster toward the sound. Self-preservation lends him a little strength, but his fear of that loss, even if he wouldn't be alive to know it, forces him to move. He tries to blink the shifting light of the forest back into focus as one of the approaching figures hits the ground. He tries to blink away the after-image of a blaster flash.

The light pressed into his vision dissolves into Jyn's face, her worried eyes.

"Cassian," she says, and hearing his name on her lips is to taste his own fear. She came back for him. She risked her own life, for him. He wishes she hadn't, knows rationally she should have left, yet knows with the weight of an inexorable truth that he is so, so happy to see her.

This fear is contradictory. He fears for her that she stays, risking her life for the rebellion, for him. He fears for her if she leaves, alone in an unyieldingly harsh galaxy. Try as he might, he can't help factor his own fear for himself into the equation as well. He fears for himself if she stays, a startling loss of impartiality, of removal, of cool-headed judgement, of the ability to occasionally perform the tasks he later buries deep down within himself and tries to ignore. He fears for himself if she leaves, fears the loss of that blinding, searing, star-bright light that follows her wherever she goes and leaves the half-sour taste of hope in his mouth.

"Cassian," she says again, a hand fisted in his jacket.

He watches her lips form the syllables of his name. There's a split in her lower lip, dried blood a sharp red against her skin. Her eyes are the color he only half remembered in the shade his mind conjured of her.

"Can you walk?" she asks, when he still doesn't respond. 

She hauls him to his feet with one arm around his back and her opposite hand grabbing the waistband of his pants. He ends up slumped against her as he regains his equilibrium, one arm over her shoulders, the other clutching his blaster by his side. His cheek is against her hair, and he stays like that a moment longer than he knows he should, not as long as he wants to.

He straightens up a bit and Jyn shifts against him, pulling his weight across her shoulders so he can walk.

"This is the last time you're allowed to negotiate with anarchists by yourself," she says.

"Thank you," he says. Thank you for coming back for me, he means. Thank you for being here, he means. Thank you for being you, he means.

"I'll always come back," she says, and the little half-smile she gives him, looking up through dark lashes, dirt over the faint freckles across her nose that he can only see sometimes, in certain light-- she's better than any fever dream his mind could ever make of her. That half-sour taste of hope is there again, and he savors it.

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on tumblr! Let's continue with the previous tradition of song rec's... We'll start with Through the Ghost by Shinedown and Iron by Woodkid.


End file.
